Haven’t you tried to produce meaningful wines?

The US wine market is going through a demand-based correction; baby boomers leaving the age of active consumption while younger generations gravitate towards the healthier lifestyle and increasingly prefer marijuana over wine. You heard this narrative countless times. It is copied from market reports to news stories and broadly regarded as a self-evident consensus across the industry in the United States. Accepted almost axiomatically, it leads to some peculiar creations of corporate thought such as fitness wines sold as “low sugar wines for healthy people”, and to the endless debate on Gen Z preferences as if they were an alien species ontologically different to older generations. Probably they indeed are, in the sense that being defines consciousness, but it is almost comical how the industry blames younger people and marijuana instead of having a critical look at its own behavior and habits. Just like your parents, probably.

In this narrative of market reports, wine is viewed as a commodity, like oil or sugar. But a commercial wine in its uniquely American sense is indeed a commodity. It is not necessarily inexpensive; it can be priced at $50 or even $250 per bottle, it can be costly to produce, it can even have high scores from reputable critics, but as long as it can’t evoke cultural and aesthetical experiences, it is still a commodity. Not that a cultural product cannot be created by a deliberate business attempt; but to do that, the producing body needs to have appropriate cultural capital. A reliable heuristic exists: if a wine doesn’t have a technical sheet that discloses the details of production, it is most likely a commercial wine. Not all American wines are like this, but most of them sadly are.

Technical sheets aren’t published for a reason. In 2025, 6.4% of all California grapes by weight amounted to Rubired, a grape variety which sole purpose is the production of high-color concentrates such as Mega Purple. It is just below Pinot Noir (6.9%) and above Sauvignon Blanc (5.9%) and Zinfandel (5.4%).^[1] The practice of adding high-color concentrates, a sugary liquid with the extremely high content of anthocyanins made from a non-Vinifera grape, to add color, body and jammy mouthfeel, in order to make wines more appealing for the broader public is still widespread to the extent of Rubired exceeding Zinfandel in California.

This practice has historical roots. The US winemaking industry was created by Prohibition: between 1920 and 1933, total grape acreage in California more than doubled; wine was easier than beer to produce at home or in the basements of speakeasies, and trainloads of grapes were sent from California to Chicago to fuel the underground industry.^[2] Sometimes wine, already fermented, was shipped under the label of grape juice, and it is still reflected in the American industry jargon when wine is colloquially called “juice” by those who make and sell it. It was during Prohibition that American wine became a perfect commodity, with substitutable sources of grapes, large-scale blending, the separation of viticulture and winemaking, unverifiable marketing narratives for price justification, and widespread adulteration. Many modern winemaking companies originate from the bootlegging business of the Prohibition era.^[3] Corporate cultures are extremely difficult to change, and founders’ ethos can persist for decades or centuries. A highly industrialized approach to winemaking promoted by UC Davis since the 1950s further contributed to the style of American commercial wines.

So, younger generations indeed are less keen about wine. In particular, about $50 overripe jammy wines without technical sheets, probably containing high-color concentrates, with names invented by marketers, from the grapes of unknown origin. They don’t buy them, because they don’t see value. These wines seem fake to younger consumers because, well, they are, in a broader sense, fake. And at least some consumers extrapolate this perception to all wines in the world, because why wouldn’t they?

American wines are overpriced in comparison to their European counterparts in general, but Napa Valley is the extreme case. Among all wines rated by Wine Spectator in 2013-2022, a median price for a 90-point Napa Valley Cabernet was $87; for a 90-point Pauillac, it was $48 and for a 90-point Rioja it was $29, and these are retail prices in the United States, not in the corresponding domestic markets. The boomers were ideal consumers: susceptible to advertising, prone to Leibenstein’s Bandwagon effect,^[4] eager to spend on social signaling. Younger generations, lacking the feel of financial security, are more apt in critical thinking, and they aren’t ready to buy something that screams fake just to show off.

The only price category that performed noticeably better than others in 2023-2024 is the wines priced between $15 in $20 in the off-premise sector; the second best is $20-$30.^[5] Plenty of inexpensive imported wines that can provide cultural experience can be found in this category; these are smart buys for those who know how to appreciate wine but don’t have much of disposable income.

To introduce younger people to wine, you need to educate them; but to keep selling expensive commercial wines, you need to keep customers uneducated. The industry not only hasn’t found a solution to this dilemma but even failed to conceptualize this contradiction.

Large US wine producers also seem to almost ostentatiously ignore worldwide trends, at least for a couple of decades. They still haven’t adopted the terroir-based narratives about their wines; of course, it is the structure of the industry originated in Prohibition that discourages them, but they don’t even appear to try. In the last decade, the worldwide wine fashion pendulum swung to shorter extraction and to Burgundy over Bordeaux in the sense of lighter terroir-driven wines instead of heavier engineered wines, but California still produces more grapes for high-color concentrates than Zinfandel.

Are you sure that your customers indeed like 24% Petite Sirah in your Pinot Noir? At a wine tasting in London, I recently heard from a layman that he wants a Pinot Noir to be translucent, and denser versions are too heavy to drink; it was an English Pinot Noir that appeared “too dense” for him. The Americans are surely different, but the United States are not that isolated from the rest of the world – the industry’s tendency to ignore global trends eventually has consequences.

Understanding the structural causes of the current crisis makes it possible to come up with a new vision and a positive agenda. There are much better solutions than closing facilities and laying off staff.

Ilya Zabolotnov

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